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Monday, November 24, 2014

Activists expand labour and human rights campaign beyond Qatar to include all Gulf states

Human rights groups and trade unions have stepped up
pressure on Qatar to reform its restrictive labour system and expanded their
campaign to include all six wealthy members of the Gulf Cooperation Council
(GCC).

The activists hope that Qatar may move quicker on promised
reforms given that the integrity of the Gulf state’s successful 2022 World Cup
bid has again been called into question as a result of world soccer body FIFA’s
four-year long corruption scandal.

They also hope that their increased pressure will benefit
from the fact that multiple conflicts in the Middle East and North Africa may
make other Gulf states like Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates more
sensitive to criticism.

Virtually all members of the GCC -- Qatar, Saudi Arabia,
Kuwait, Bahrain, the United Arab Emirates and Oman -- have begun to tinker with
the their labour laws and regulations as a result of the pressure on Qatar as
well as publicity surrounding multiple cases of abuse of workers, including
rape and beatings of domestic help. At the same time, they have stepped up
crackdowns on domestic critics.

The UAE in response to criticism by human rights groups and
trade unions has invested heavily in projecting itself as a forward looking,
modern state and key US ally, America’s Little Sparta in the Middle East and
North Africa, in the words of Washington Post reporter Rajiv Chandrasekaran.

In a throwback to the days after the 9/11 Al Qaeda attacks
on New York and Washington, Saudi Arabia is fending off charges that its
investment of billions of dollars in the last three decades in the global
spread of Wahhabism, the kingdom’s puritan, inward-looking interpretation of
Islam, is an important ideological and theological inspiration for jihadist
groups like Islamic State, the group that controls a swath of Syria and Iraq.

In a statement as GCC labour ministers were meeting in
Kuwait, 93 human rights groups and trade unions demanded the abolition of the
region’s kafala or sponsorship system that puts workers at the mercy of their
employers; ratify and implement international labour and human rights
standards; and engage with trade unions. The statement highlighted the plight
of domestic workers, the most vulnerable group of foreign labour, because they
often are not included in legal labour provisions.

The International Trade Union Confederation (ITUC) charged
in a report published this weekend that GCC governments rather than amending
laws and regulations have sought to confront the issue by agreeing on
regionally standardized employment contracts that in the unions’ view “revealed
serious defects.” The ITUC said the Gulf states lacked the political will to
enact meaningful reform.

The activists’ stepped-up pressure is likely to be the
heaviest on Qatar, the only GCC member that since its winning of its World Cup
bid almost four years ago, has engaged with its critics. Unlike other Gulf
states that bar entry to foreign activists and incarcerate their critics, Qatar
has worked with the likes of Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch to
develop new standards. It has allowed them to investigate the conditions of
foreign workers who constitute a majority of the population in several Gulf
states and issue condemnatory reports at news conferences in Doha.

The statement, issued in advance of the Abu Dhabi Dialogue, a
collaborative multilateral governmental effort to improve labour mobility in
Asia, signals mounting exasperation among activists with Qatar’s failure to put
its money where its mouth is. Two major Qatari institutions, the Qatar
Foundation and the 2022 Supreme Committee for Delivery & Legacy of the
World Cup, have adopted in cooperation with human rights groups significantly
improved labour standards. Qatar has however yet to adopt those standards
nationally and ensure their implementation. The standards moreover fall far
short of an abolition of kafala that among other things restricts a foreign
worker’s ability to freely travel or seek alternative employment.

The reference in the statement to increased engagement with trade
unions further underlines growing impatience among activists. In contrast to
Qatar’s engagement with human rights group, its relationship with the ITUC has
been troubled because of the group’s more aggressive approach which amounted to
a good cop-bad cop division of labour among activists. Human rights activists
have conceded in the past that labour reform constitutes an existential issue
for Qatar, a country in which the citizenry accounts for a mere 12 percent of
the population and that the Gulf state as a result would need time to act. The
call for increased engagement implies however a growing sense among activists
four years after Qatar won its World Cup hosting rights that the good cop-bad
cop strategy has failed to produce results.

The activists’ expanded focus was evident in a series of
recent reports on various Gulf states. It comes amid the inclusion of human and
labour rights in contracts issued by the International Olympic Committee (IOC)
to future hosts of the Olympic Games and acknowledgement by FIFA that those
rights should be part of its hosting criteria. Human rights groups and others
like Transparency International are putting sports high on their agendas. Qatar
and the UAE both have ambitions to host an Olympic Games.

The IOC’s focus on human rights puts Qatar because of the World
Cup in the firing line and could have a fallout for Bahrain and the Asian
Football Confederation (AFC) that is headed by a member of the Bahraini ruling
family as a result of allegations that senior Bahraini sports officials have
been involved in the repression of athletes who allegedly participated in
anti-government protests in recent years. Restriction of women’s sporting
rights has also positioned Saudi Arabia and Iran, the GCC’s nemesis in the
struggle for regional power, centre stage in the efforts of international
sports associations to achieve some modicum of adherence to human rights.

Human Rights Watch and Amnesty have both in the last month
targeted the UAE, already under fire for the conditions of foreign workers
constructing facilities in Abu Dhabi for the Guggenheim Museum and New York
University and in advance of Dubai’s hosting of the 2020 Expo. A Human Rights
Watch report in late October focusing on conditions of domestic workers said
the situation in the UAE was symptomatic for the region.

The UAE’s sponsorship system "chains domestic workers
to their employers and then leaves them isolated and at risk of abuse behind
the closed doors of private homes. With no labour law protections for domestic
workers, employers can, and many do, overwork, underpay, and abuse these
women,” said Rothna Begum, the group’s researcher. Rather than engaging, the
UAE, Human Rights Watch said, reacted with “the usual complacency,” It accused
the group of "sensationalist reporting."

Amnesty, in a report entitled ‘There is no freedom here,
Silencing dissent in the United Arab Emirates (UAE),’ charged last week that
beneath “the glitz, the gloss and the glamour of the façade that the UAE’s
rulers present to the world there is a much uglier reality where activists who
dare to challenge the authorities or speak out in favour of greater democracy and
government accountability are thrown into jail. There, they are cut off from
the outside world for months at a time before they are tried and sentenced to
long prison terms by courts that do little more than rubber stamp the decisions
of the UAE executive.”

Far-reaching changes in its labour regim in response to the
stepped up pressure could make Qatar a driver of change in a region that leaves
no stone unturned in its effort to maintain the status quo and ring fence
itself against the Middle East and North Africa’s clamour for change.

Qatar is because of the World Cup the Gulf state and
multi-facetted soft power strategy most vulnerable to external pressure.
Reforms it enacts will inevitably ripple throughout the Gulf. As a result,
Qatar, already at odds with Saudi Arabia and the UAE because of its support for
Islamists including the Muslim Brotherhood, could despite being an autocracy
emerge in more than one way as a reluctant and perhaps unwitting catalyst of
rather than a bulwark against some degree of change.

James M.
Dorsey is a senior fellow at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies,
co-director of the University of Wuerzburg’s Institute for Fan Culture, and the
author of The Turbulent World of Middle East
Soccer blog
and a forthcoming book with the same title.

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About Me

James M DorseyWelcome to The Turbulent World of Middle East Soccer by James M. Dorsey, a senior fellow at Nanyang Technological University’s S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies. Soccer in the Middle East and North Africa is played as much on as off the pitch. Stadiums are a symbol of the battle for political freedom; economic opportunity; ethnic, religious and national identity; and gender rights. Alongside the mosque, the stadium was until the Arab revolt erupted in late 2010 the only alternative public space for venting pent-up anger and frustration. It was the training ground in countries like Egypt and Tunisia where militant fans prepared for a day in which their organization and street battle experience would serve them in the showdown with autocratic rulers. Soccer has its own unique thrill – a high-stakes game of cat and mouse between militants and security forces and a struggle for a trophy grander than the FIFA World Cup: the future of a region. This blog explores the role of soccer at a time of transition from autocratic rule to a more open society. It also features James’s daily political comment on the region’s developments. Contact: incoherentblog@gmail.comView my complete profile